Book Review: Gray Mountain

John Grisham's latest fall outing Gray Mountain has its heart in the right place, but is also sloppily cobbled together, like as if the editor slept through the process before sending off the manuscript for publishing. There's a bare bones structure of a story, cooked up perfunctorily as if Grisham wanted the reader's full focus on the main theme instead of poring over the details he clearly feels superfluous. The result is that Samantha Kofer, the protagonist, comes across as shallow, self-absorbed and singularly uninteresting. She is 29 and is a third-year associate at a big New York law firm, working 100 hours per week on a job she hates but earning a $180,000 annual paycheck. All she wants in her professional life is to become the firm's partner by the time she is 35.

Gray Mountain

Unfortunately for Samantha, her dreams come crashing down like a London Bridge when recession hits hard and the U.S. economy tanks. The panicked law firms begin handing out pink slips at large to partners and associates, and Samantha, who has only seen success in her life so far, suddenly finds herself without a job and more importantly, no future prospects (at least until the economy turns around). But there is a silver lining. If she is ready to intern with a non-profit agency for no pay, she can keep her health benefits and will be considered for rehiring once prosperity blooms. She agrees. She begrudgingly moves to a small town in Virginia as an unpaid intern at Mountain Legal Aid Clinic and is very soon confronted with its poverty and its real problems.

The central theme of Gray Mountain is about the ecological disaster unfolding in the Appalachia due to mountaintop removal coal mining, the health hazards it poses to mining workers from inhaling coal dust, and how the big coal companies avoid paying health benefits to black-lung afflicted workers by resorting to delay tactics, litigation and in some cases even coercion. And to put up a fight against these thugs is daunting, pressurising and life-threatening. It's into this hitherto unseen world that Samantha steps into, but the million dollar question is whether will she return to her city of dreams, to pursue the career she wanted, or stand back and fight for the poor and the downtrodden.

Grisham paints a moving portrait of the grim situation, but given the story's potential, it could have been a thrilling legal drama, a fascinating David versus Goliath battle. The book instead feels like a lazily put together docudrama, a thinly veiled diatribe clothed in a garb of fiction, with poor characterisation (Donovan and Matty's were marginally better) and no real plot device to move the story forward. To be honest, I was very excited when I came to know that Gray Mountain will have a female protagonist, something Grisham hadn't explored in a long time since The Pelican Brief and The Client, but I must say I came away totally disappointed... and bored (*gasp*)! Gray Mountain is perhaps the weakest from John Grisham in recent times.